6 ms·
A couple of hundred million dollars is a trivial write off for google. It should be a 5% of revenue.
by gress 11y ago
A couple of hundred million dollars is a trivial write off for google. It should be a 5% of revenue.
- mondoshawan 11y agoCan we stop with the witch hunts and the desire to maim folks over minor infractions like this? Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Normally your work is strong and you catch all of the corner cases, but this one you missed. You've fixed it upstream, but folks are demanding 5% of the company's bottom line because of a mistake /you/ made. The code isn't even used unless the user ticks a box to turn it on in the first place, which is even verifiable with a cursory use of system monitoring tools like fuser, lsof, etc. You've been marked as costing a company a major stake of their income. You'll likely never live that down. If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action. Chromium is an open source first browser, we as a community actually have a hand in its development. If you don't like this, fix it.
- dreamfactory2 11y ago> If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action By that reasoning, tobacco and asbestos shouldn't be regulated
- mondoshawan 11y agoWeb browsers are not addictive, nor are they toxic. The argument doesn't hold water in this case because there are alternatives.
- dreamfactory2 11y agoMassive security risk to the user and anyone around them. That's a dangerous and unsafe product which absolutely should be regulated as it can endanger the public interest. At least it's a good thing these innocent developers aren't writing software for planes I guess.
- tremon 11y agoThis is not a minor infraction, nor is it the work of a handful developers (the GP said Google, not Chromium). This is a business decision, and a hugely flawed one at that. IMNSHO, user-hostile business decisions should be fined in a way that does impact the business. We've long since passed the point where this can be resolved with a slap on the wrist. So yes, 5% of revenue seems like an appropriate figure to start with.
- mondoshawan 11y agoBy fining the business you will directly affect whether or not Chromium continues to exist if at all, because it then becomes more of a liability than an asset to the company.
- ionised 11y ago> Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Surely a developer working for Google knows that user privacy is not a priority for the company?
- mondoshawan 11y agoAfter working there for eight years, I can confirm the contrary of this statement. Google cares very much about user privacy -- the engineers doing the work even more so. The quote from one of their SREs swearing about the Snowden revelations was drop dead true, and engineers there have been working /very/ hard to fix issues like this. Google does not operate like Apple -- there are many hands at the tiller, and the ship moves in almost arbitrary directions at times. Situations like this do come up, and they are most of the time honest mistakes or oversights.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoGoogle cares very much about user privacy Google cares very much about other actors violating user privacy. Not quite the same amount of "caring" if the violations are being done by Google itself.